So I see people saying "John Carter" rips off "Avatar," "Star Wars" and "Planet Hulk." The supply of stupid is just about endless, huh?
While I share his frustration, being unaware of John Carter doesn't make someone "stupid".
Unawareness alone, maybe not. Making a pronouncement that something is a ripoff,holding out that you're enough of a connoisseur to make that judgment, then totally whiffing on one the founding works of science fiction -- that's somewhere in a stupid zip code at least.
You're sort of reserving the word "stupid" for some special class of narrow circumstances.
"I've never heard of John Carter" is merely ignorant, innocently so. "John Carter rips off Star Wars" is a stupid thing to say -- it's ignorance combined with a total disregard for the fact that there's a whole body of work out there you're unaware of, and that you would need to at least moderately look into something before calling it a ripoff. Further, beyond just being ignorance, it's based on a tragic failure to recognize how little you know. Can you imagine someone that's never heard of John Carter even remotely considering themselves qualified to declare anything ripoff? It's a pretty good approximation of the difference between ignorance and stupid.
I think the uncomfortable truth we're circling around here, the elephant in the room, if you will, is the fact you are stupid. There, I've said it.
I don't know who these people are that called John Carter a ripoff, nor do I know exactly what they said or who they said it to, but I am seething with anger at them.
Can you imagine someone that's never heard of John Carter even remotely considering themselves qualified to declare anything ripoff? It's a pretty good approximation of the difference between ignorance and stupid.
But it's not like John Carter's got any real noteriety with the general public. If someone saw a preview for Jackson's King Kong remake and declared, "This is a total rip-off of Mighty Joe Young!" we'd be silently nodding in agreement and perhaps even making awkward levels of eye contact. But John Carter? Every "civilian" I've spoken to has never heard of the guy -- I always have to explain what his whole deal is.
I think it's perfectly understandable for a younger person who isn't familiar with the history of science fiction & fantasy novels (most people) to see this trailer and be reminded of that shit-sandwich Avatar or whatever. "Hey, they just same out with a movie about a young dude fulfilling an ancient prophecy for weird-colored aliens on another planet!"
Even before this trailer, my thoughts were that any ad campaign would have to emphasize that this is one of the original sci-fi epics ever -- in a sea of special effects "slam bang" sci-fi flicks that Hollywood floats out there, it'd be easy to see how a regular person would be "meh" about this one. I'd think an ad campaign would have something like... "Before Avatar... Before Star Wars... From the Creator of Tarzan... Comes the Original Science Fiction Epic..." and then you see shots of jiggling titties for nine minutes or so.
Li'l Jay wrote:
I think the uncomfortable truth we're circling around here, the elephant in the room, if you will, is the fact you are stupid. There, I've said it.
I think they're stupid not to be aware generally that there's a rich tradition in this general area, and to fail to realize how derivative Avatar and Star Wars were of what had gone before.
But admittedly, I throw the word "stupid" around with gusto. It's entirely understandable that they would, in fact, be stupid. And I'm assuming they're saying it on blogs or something where they took enough time to write it without even so much as googling or reading anything about John Carter. If they just said at their coffee table, it hardly seems worth it to even bring up.
I think you don't understand just how nerdy we are for even knowing all this trivial knowledge about comics, sci-fi and fantasy. You look down on them but in reality, they'd be pink-bellying us and throwing our school books in the gutter.
I think you don't understand just how nerdy we are for even knowing all this trivial knowledge about comics, sci-fi and fantasy. You look down on them but in reality, they'd be pink-bellying us and throwing our school books in the gutter.
We're talking about people who mentioned "Planet Hulk." They're nerds. The worst kind of nerds -- they think their little funny books are the whole world with no antecedents in literature, pulp, or science fiction.
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